[anonymoushn]

I've found bgg's weight to be pretty uncorrelated with whether the game actually survives when players make a sincere effort to win. An illustrative sample of games sorted by weight might be Splendor, Wingspan, Res Arcana, Roll for the Galaxy, Race for the Galaxy, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, A Feast for Odin, and Through the Ages. Of these, the middle games Res Arcana and Roll for the Galaxy completely collapse under the slightest effort to take them seriously, and Wingspan does less than great (you can just tear your ravens in half though, if you want to make things a bit better). Race, Splendor, and Conquest hold up quite well. I don't know enough about the final 2 games to tell whether they'll still be recognizable after 1,000 plays, but it seems like even if a huge part of the options in those games turn out to be unplayably bad the remainder of the options might still contain some interesting choices.

[chongli]

Yeah. Some of the heavier games are casual, cooperative, relaxing game night affairs, for example Pandemic Legacy (weight 3.24).

Yet Santorini (weight 1.73), despite its cute art style, is an absolute monster of a game when played competitively against strong opponents. Many of the reviews reflect this, with a lot of people comparing it to chess and go.

Honestly, I think you could approximate the weight rating of most games by setting the box on a scale. Other than telling you how many different components you’ll get, the weight rating is only a rough approximation of depth.

Another pair of games to compare is Agricola and Caverna. These ones have very similar weights (a bit under 4) yet they play dramatically differently. Agricola is extremely tight and vicious with competitive play. Caverna, on the other hand, is a victory point bonanza. This has led to a sharp divide in the community, with Caverna having stolen a lot of the ‘thematic’ players from its older sibling.

Edit: I need to add that I in no way intended to disparage thematic players. I love thematic games too. My preferences usually change based on my mood and energy levels. Thematic games are much better on a Friday night after work, with good friends, good food, and tasty beverages. Fierce, competitive games are much more of a Saturday afternoon rainy day type of situation.

[StephanTLavavej]

Can you expand on how Roll breaks down when the players are trying to win?

[anonymoushn]

Produce-consume ends up not working for almost all starting conditions. A lot of tiles seem tuned for a game where players leave their dice around, particularly as goods on planets, but it turns out you don't really need more than 9 dice. Players spend much of the game fishing for 6-devs, especially 6-devs that reward the player for playing a bunch of devs. If you don't get those, you can try to win with the 6-devs that reward you for playing a bunch of planets, but it's tough. Random access to starting conditions that do something, cheap planets that give red dice, and dev-oriented 6-devs ends up feeling bad, since these tiles are so much better than the other tiles.

I didn't play with expansions because they aren't on the phone app. This might be unfair, because I'm comparing it to Race with expansions.

[2muchcoffeeman]

The entire game industry kinda survives off being the new hotness. Look at the top 100 on BGG. And some of the newer more accessible games will get a ton of ratings that I would argue they don't really deserve.

[mercutio2]

I could not disagree more about Res Arcana.

I would put it first in my list of games that hold up when attempting to win.

Are you playing it with serious gamers? It has about the highest return to skill of any short game I know these days except Race.

A key test: do any of your games ever take more than 4 rounds to someone winning? If so, your group hasn’t gotten very deep in it yet.

[anonymoushn]

I've been around the top of the BGA leaderboard for this game. It's mostly about being Witch, buying PoPs in round 1, and trying to grab Reanimate. BGA players taught me that the game contained even less slack than I thought by opening with round 1 turn 1 alchemize, round 1 turn 2 buy alchemist's tower, which I eventually adopted.

It feels like a lot of the variety in the game should come from the 8 cards in your deck, but it can't if you just discard them most of the time.

[mercutio2]

OK! Well, I guess it comes down to what you mean by "completely collapse". I enjoy the BGA leaderboards, but only got to the top 50 or so when I was actively trying.

I agree that you're going to discard 3/4 of your artifacts, and ~50% of them are almost never worth playing. But I've been continuously surprised by people pulling out wins with PoP/artifact combinations I didn't expect to be viable.

If your definition of "completely collapses" is "some paths are much better than others in high level play", then I guess we just disagree on what makes a good heavy board game.

I do agree with you that Wingspan has a corvidae problem, though; I've never seen anyone but a beginner lose with an early raven.

[anonymoushn]

From my PoV it's not "some paths are much better than others" so much as "almost all of the paths are not worth taking." The game feels really centralized around the 3 best PoPs and some Athanor/Philosopher's Stone gameplans (though other stuff can win and it's always fun to see that). I can't call any mages *blank* in the same way I can call some Roll starting devs blank, but your Druid is just not expected to have a great time against a Witch or Duelist or even a Seer.

This is all subjective, of course. The Splendor designers obviously intended for players who purchase a large number of small holdings to be able to win. Every variant in the expansion works to address this issue. Another player could reasonably say "Splendor has failed because everyone just rushes to buy about 2 big holdings." To me, "Splendor but everyone goes for big holdings right away" is still pretty good at being Splendor. "Res Arcana but you rush a PoP and get like 8 VPs from it and 2 from a monument" feels disappointing compared to the game I thought I would be playing. I'm glad you like it! A friend tells me the 2nd expansion makes a lot of things better, so I'm looking forward to trying it out.